Entries tagged "intervju".

It was a surprise to me to learn that project to create a complete
computer system for schools I've involved in,
Debian Edu / Skolelinux, was
being used in India. But apparently it is, and I managed to get an
interview with one of the friends of the project there, Shirish
Agarwal.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Shirish Agarwal. Based out of the educational and
historical city of Pune, from the western state of Maharashtra, India.
My bread comes from giving training, giving policy tips,
installations on free software to mom and pop shops in different
fields from Desktop publishing to retail shops as well as work with
few software start-ups as well.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

It started innocently enough. I have been using Debian for a few
years and in one local minidebconf / debutsav I was asked if there was
anything for schools or education. I had worked / played with free
educational softwares such as Gcompris and Stellarium for my many
nieces and nephews so researched and found Debian Edu or Skolelinux as
it was known then. Since then I have started using the various
education meta-packages provided by the project.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

It's closest I have seen where a package full of educational
software are packed, which are free and open (both literally and
figuratively). Even if I take the simplest software which is
gcompris, the number of activities therein are amazing. Another one of
the softwares that I have liked for a long time is stellarium. Even
pysycache is cool except for couple of issues I encountered
#781841 and
#781842.

I prefer software installed on the system over web based solutions,
as a web site can disappear any time but the software on disk has the
possibility of a larger life span. Of course with both it's more a
question if it has enough users who make it fun or sustainable or both
for the developer per-se.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I do see that the Debian Edu team seems to be short-handed and I
think more efforts should be made to make it popular and ask and take
help from people and the larger community wherever possible.

I don't see any disadvantage to use Skolelinux apart from the fact
that most apps. are generic which is good or bad how you see it.
However, saying that I do acknowledge the fact that the canvas is
pretty big and there are lot of interesting ideas that could be done
but for reasons not known not done or if done I don't know about them.
Let me share some of the ideas (these are more upstream based but
still) I have had for a long time :

1. Classical maths question of two trains in opposing directions
each running @x kmph/mph at y distance, when they will meet and how
far would each travel and similar questions like these.

The computer is a fantastic system where questions like these can
be drawn, animated and the methodology and answers teased out in
interactive manner. While sites such as the
Ask
Dr. Math FAQ on The Two Trains problem (as an example or point of
inspiration) can be used there is lot more that can be done. I dunno
if there is a free software which does something like this. The idea
being a blend of objects + animation + interaction which does
this. The whole interaction could be gamified with points or sounds or
colourful celebration whenever the user gets even part of the question
or/and methodology right. That would help reinforce good behaviour.
This understanding could be used to share/showcase everything from how
the first wheel came to be, to evolution to how astronomy started,
psychics and everything in-between.

One specific idea in the train part was having the Linux mascot on
one train and the BSD or GNU mascot on the other train and they
meeting somewhere in-between. Characters from blender movies could
also be used.

2. Loads of crossword-puzzles with reference to subjects: We have
enormous data sets in Wikipedia and Wikitionary. I don't think it
should be a big job to design crossword puzzles. Using categories and
sub-categories it should be doable to have Q&A single word answers
from the existing data-sets. What would make it easy or hard could be
the length of the word + existence of many or few vowels depending on
the user's input.

3. Jigsaw puzzles - We already have a great software called
palapeli with number of slicers making it pretty interesting. What
needs to be done is to download large number of public domain and
copyleft images, tease and use IPTC tags to categorise them into
nature, history etc. and let it loose. This could turn to be really
huge collection of images. One source could be taken from
commons.wikimedia.org, others could be huge collection of royalty-free
stock photos. Potential is immense.

Apart from this, free software suffers in two directions, we lag
both in development (of using new features per-se) and maintenance a
lot. This is more so in educational software as these applications
need to be timely and the opportunity cost of missing deadlines is
immense. If we are able to solve issues of funding for development and
maintenance of such software I don't see any big difficulties. I know
of few start-ups in and around India who would love to develop and
maintain such software if funding issues could be solved.

Which free software do you use daily?

That would be huge list. Some of the softwares are obviously apt,
aptitude, debdelta, leafpad, the shell of course (zsh nowadays),
quassel for IRC. In games I use shisen-sho while card-games are evenly
between kpat and Aiselriot. In desktops it's a tie between
gnome-flashback and mate.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I think it should first start with using specific FOSS apps. in
whatever environment they are. If it's MS-Windows or Mac so be it.
Once they are habitual with the apps. and there is buy-in from the
school management then it could be installed anywhere. Most of the
people now understand the concept of a repository because of the
various online stores so it isn't hard to convince on that front.

What is harder is having enough people with technical skills and
passion to service them. If you get buy-in from one or two teachers
then ideas like above could also be asked to be done as a project as
well.

I think where we fall short more than anything is in marketing. For
instance, Debian has this whole range of fonts in its archive but
there isn't even a page where all those different fonts in the La
Ipsum format could be tried out for newcomers.

One of the issues faced constantly in installations is with updates
and upgrades. People have this myth that each update and upgrade
means the user interface will / has to change. I have seen this
innumerable times. That perhaps is one of the reasons which browsers
like Iceweasel / Firefox change user interfaces so much, not because
it might be needed or be functional but because people believe that
changed user interfaces are better. This, can easily be pointed with
the user interfaces changed with almost every MS-Windows and Mac OS
releases.

The problems with Debian Edu for deployment are many. The biggest
is the huge gap between what is taught in schools and what Debian Edu
is aimed at.

Me and my friends did teach on week-ends in a government school for
around 2 years, and
gathered
some experience there. Some of the things we learnt/discovered
there was :

Most of the teachers are very territorial about their subjects
and they do not want you to teach anything out of the
portion/syllabus given.

They want any activity on the system in accordance to whatever
is in the syllabus.

There are huge barriers both with the English language and at
times with objects or whatever. An example, let's say in gcompris
you have objects falling down and you have to name them and let's
say the falling object is a hat or a fedora hat, this would not be
as recognizable as say a
Puneri
Pagdi so there is need to inject local objects, words wherever
possible. Especially for word-games there are so many hindi words
which have become part of english vocabulary (for instance in
parley), those could be made into a hinglish collection or
something but that is something for upstream to do.

The complete and free “out of the box” software solution for
schools, Debian Edu /
Skolelinux, is used quite a lot in Germany, and one of the people
involved is Bernd Zeitzen, who show up on the project mailing lists
from time to time with interesting questions and tips on how to adjust
the setup. I managed to interview him this summer.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Bernd Zeitzen and I'm married with Hedda, a self
employed physiotherapist. My former profession is tool maker, but I
haven't worked for 30 years in this job. 30 years ago I started to
support my wife and become her officeworker and a few years later the
administrator for a small computer network, today based on Ubuntu
Server (Samba, OpenVPN). For her daily work she has to use Windows
Desktops because the software she needs to organize her business only
works with Windows . :-(

In 1988 we started with one PC and DOS, then I learned to use
Windows 98, 2000, XP, …, 8, Ubuntu, MacOSX. Today we are running a
Linux server with 6 Windows clients and 10 persons (teacher of
children with special needs, speech therapist, occupational therapist,
psychologist and officeworkers) using our Samba shares via OpenVPN to
work with the documentations of our patients.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

Two years ago a friend of mine asked me, if I want to get a job in
his school (Gymnasium
Harsewinkel). They started with Skolelinux / Debian Edu and they
were looking for people to give support to the teachers using the
software and the network and teaching the pupils increasing their
computer skills in optional lessons. I'm spending 4-6 hours a week
with this job.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

The independence.

First: Every person is allowed to use, share and develop the
software. Even if you are poor, you are allowed to use the software
included in Skolelinux/Debian Edu and all the other Free Software.

Second: The software runs on old machines and this gives us the
possibility to recycle computers, weeded out from offices. The
servers and desktops are running for more than two years and they are
working reliable.

We have two servers (one tjener and one terminal server), 45
workstations in three classrooms and seven laptops as a mobile
solution for all classrooms. These machines are all booting from the
terminal server. In the moment we are installing 30 laptops as mobile
workstations. Then the pupils have the possibility to work with these
machines in their classrooms. Internet access is realized by a WLAN
router, connected to the schools network. This is all done without a
dedicated system administrator or a computer science teacher.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Teachers and pupils are Windows users. <Irony on> And Linux
isn't cool. It's software for freaks using the command line. <Irony
off> They don't realize the stability of the system.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

In Germany we have the situation: every school is free to decide
which software they want to use. This decision is influenced by
teachers who learned to use Windows and MS Office. They buy a PC with
Windows preinstalled and an additional testing version of MS
Office. They don't know about the possibility to use Free Software
instead. Another problem are the publisher of school books. They
develop their software, added to the school books, for Windows.

Debian Edu / Skolelinux
keep gaining new users. Some weeks ago, a person showed up on IRC,
#debian-edu, with a
wish to contribute, and I managed to get a interview with this great
contributor Roger Marsal to learn more about his background.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Roger Marsal, I'm 27 years old (1986 generation) and I
live in Barcelona, Spain. I've got a strong business background and I
work as a patrimony manager and as a real estate agent. Additionally,
I've co-founded a British based tech company that is nowadays on the
last development phase of a new social networking concept.

I'm a Linux enthusiast that started its journey with Ubuntu four years
ago and have recently switched to Debian seeking rock solid stability
and as a necessary step to gain expertise.

In a nutshell, I spend my days working and learning as much as I
can to face both my job, entrepreneur project and feed my Linux
hunger.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I discovered the LTSP advantages
with "Ubuntu 12.04 alternate install" and after a year of use I
started looking for an alternative. Even though I highly value and
respect the Ubuntu project, I thought it was necessary for me to
change to a more robust and stable alternative. As far as I was using
Debian on my personal laptop I thought it would be fine to install
Debian and configure an LTSP server myself. Surprised, I discovered
that the Debian project also supported a kind of Edubuntu equivalent,
and after having some pain I obtained a Debian Edu network up and
running. I just loved it.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I found a main advantage in that, once you know "the tips and
tricks", a new installation just works out of the box. It's the most
complete alternative I've found to create an LTSP network. All the
other distributions seems to be made of plastic, Debian Edu seems to
be made of steel.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I found two main disadvantages.

I'm not an expert but I've got notions and I had to spent a considerable
amount of time trying to bring up a standard network topology. I'm quite
stubborn and I just worked until I did but I'm sure many people with few
resources (not big schools, but academies for example) would have switched
or dropped.

It's amazing how such a complex system like Debian Edu has achieved
this out-of-the-box state. Even though tweaking without breaking gets
more difficult, as more factors have to be considered. This can
discourage many people too.

Which free software do you use daily?

I use Debian, Firefox, Okular, Inkscape, LibreOffice and
Virtualbox.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I don't think there is a need for a particular strategy. The free
attribute in both "freedom" and "no price" meanings is what will
really bring free software to schools. In my experience I can think of
the "R" statistical language; a
few years a ago was an extremely nerd tool for university people.
Today it's being increasingly used to teach statistics at many
different level of studies. I believe free and open software will
increasingly gain popularity, but I'm sure schools will be one of the
first scenarios where this will happen.

The Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project consist of both newcomers and old timers, and this time I
was able to get an interview with a newcomer in the project who showed
up on the IRC channel a few weeks ago to let us know about his
successful installation of Debian Edu Wheezy in his School. Say hello
to Dominik
George.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a 23 year-old student from Germany who has spent half of his
life with open source. In "real life", I am, as already mentioned, a
student in the fields of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering,
Information Technologies and Anglistics. Due to my (only partially
voluntary) huge engagement in the open source world, these things are
a bit vacant right now however.

I also have been working as a project teacher at a Gymasnium
(public school) for various years now. I took up that work some time
around 2005 when still attending that school myself and have continued
it until today. I also had been running the (kind of very advanced)
network of that school together with a team of very interested and
talented students in the age of 11 to 15 years, who took the chance to
learn a lot about open source and networking before I left the school
to help building another school's informational education concept from
scratch.

That said, one might see me as a kind of "glue" between school kids
and the elderly of teachers as well as between the open source
ecosystem and the (even more complex) educational ecosystem.

When I am not busy with open source or education, I like Geocaching
and cycling.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I think that happened some time around 2009 when I first attended
FrOSCon and visited the project
booth. I think I wasn't too interested back then because I used to
have an attitude of disliking software that does too much stuff on its
own. Maybe I was too inexperienced to realise the upsides of an
"out-of-the-box" solution ;).

The first time I actively talked to Skolelinux people was at
OpenRheinRuhr 2011 when the
BiscuIT project, a home-grewn software used by my school for various
really cool things from timetables and class contact lists to lunch
ordering, student ID card printing and project elections first got to
a stage where it could have been published. I asked the Skolelinux
guys running the booth if the project were interested in it and gave a
small demonstration, but there wasn't any real feedback and the guys
seemed rather uninterested.

After I left the school where I developed the software, it got
mostly lost, but I am now reimplementing it for my new school. I have
reusability and compatibility in mind, and I hop there will be a new
basis for contributing it to the Skolelinux project ;)!

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

The most important advantage seems to be that it "just
works". After overcoming some minor (but still very annoying) glitches
in the installer, I got a fully functional, working school network,
without the month-long hassle I experienced when setting all that up
from scratch in earlier years. And above that, it rocked - I didn't
have any real hardware at hand, because the school was just founded
and has no money whatsoever, so I installed a combined server (main
server, terminal services and workstation) in a VM on my personal
notebook, bridging the LTSP network interface to the ethernet port,
and then PXE-booted the Windows notebooks that were lying around from
it. I could use 8 clients without any performance issues, by using a
tiny little VM on a tiny little notebook. I think that's enough to say
that it rocks!

Secondly, there are marketing reasons. Life's bad, and so no
politician will ever permit a setup described as "Debian, an universal
operating system, with some really cool educational tools" while they
will be jsut fine with "Skolelinux, a single-purpose solution for your
school network", even if both turn out to be the very same thing (yes,
this is unfair towards the Skolelinux project, and must not be taken
too seriously - you get the idea, anyway).

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I have not been involved with Skolelinux long enough to really
answer this question in a fair way. Thus, please allow me to put it in
other words: "What do you expect from Skolelinux to keep liking it?" I
can list a few points about that:

always strive to get all things integrated into Debian upstream

be open to discussion about changes and the like, even with newcomers

be helpful at being helpful ;)

I'm really sorry I cannot say much more about that :(!

Which free software do you use daily?

First of all, all software I use is free and open. I have abandoned
all non-free software (except for firmware on my darned phone) this
year.

I run Debian GNU/Linux on all PC systems I use. On that, I mostly
run text tools. I use
mksh as shell,
jupp as very advanced
text editor (I even got the developer to help me write a script/macro
based full-featured student management software with the two),
mcabber for XMPP and
irssi for IRC. For that overly
coloured world called the WWW, I use
Iceweasel
(Firefox). Oh, and mutt for
e-mail.

However, while I am personally aware of the fact that text tools
are more efficient and powerful than anything else, I also use (or at
least operate) some tools that are suitable to bring open source to
kids. One of these things is Jappix,
which I already introduced to some kids even before they got aware of
Facebook, making them see for themselves that they do not need
Facebook now ;).

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Well, that's a two-sided thing. One side is what I believe, and one
side is what I have experienced.

I believe that the right strategy is showing them the benefits. But
that won't work out as long as the acceptance of free alternatives
grows globally. What I mean is that if all the kids are almost forced
to use Windows, Facebook, Skype, you name it at home, they will not
see why they would want to use alternatives at school. I have seen
students take seat in front of a fully-functional, modern Debian
desktop that could do anything their Windows at home could do, and
they jsut refused to use it because "Linux sucks". It is something
that makes the council of our city spend around 600000 € to buy
software - not including hardware, mind you - for operating school
networks, and for installing a system that, as has been proved, does
not work. For those of you readers who are good at maths, have you
already found out how many lives could have been saved with that money
if we had instead used it to bring education to parts of the world
that need it? I have, and found it to be nothing less dramatic than
plain criminal.

That said, the only feasible way appears to be the bottom up
method. We have to bring free software to kids and parents. I have
founded an association named
Teckids here in Germany that does
just that. We organise several events for kids and adolescents in the
area of free and open source software, for example the
FrogLabs, which share staff with
Teckids and are the youth programme of
the Free and Open Source Software
Conference (FrOSCon). We do a lot more than most other conferences
- this year, we first offered the FrogLabs as a holiday camp for kids
aged 10 to 16. It was a huge success, with approx. 30 kids taking part
and learning with and about free software through a whole weekend. All
of us had a lot of fun, and the results were really exciting.

Apart from that, we are preparing a campaign that is supposed to bring
the message of free alternatives to stuff kids use every day to them and
their parents, e.g. the use of Jabber / Jappix instead of Facebook and
Skype. To make that possible, we are planning to get together a team of
clever kids who understand very well what their peers need and can bring
it across to them. So we will have a peer-driven network of adolescents
who teach each other and collect feedback from the community of minors.
We then take that feedback and our own experience to work closely with
open source projects, such as Skolelinux or Jappix, at improving their
software in a way that makes it more and more attractive for the target
group. At least I hope that we will have good cooperation with
Skolelinux in the future ;)!

So in conclusion, what I believe is that, if it weren't for the world
being so bad, it should be very clear to the political decision makers
that the only way to go nowadays is free software for various reasons,
but I have learnt that the only way that seems to work is bottom up.

It has been a while since I managed to publish the last interview,
but the Debian Edu /
Skolelinux community is still going strong, and yesterday we even
had a new school administrator show up on
#debian-edu to share
his success story with installing Debian Edu at their school. This
time I have been able to get some helpful comments from the creator of
Knoppix, Klaus Knopper, who was involved in a Skolelinux project in
Germany a few years ago.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am Klaus Knopper. I have a master degree in electrical
engineering, and is currently professor in information management at
the university of applied sciences Kaiserslautern / Germany and
freelance Open Source software developer and consultant.

All of this is pretty much of the work I spend my days with. Apart
from teaching, I'm also conducting some more or less experimental
projects like the Knoppix GNU/Linux live
system (Debian-based like Skolelinux),
ADRIANE
(a blind-friendly talking desktop system) and
LINBO
(Linux-based network boot console, a fast remote install and repair
system supporting various operating systems).

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

The credit for this have to go to Kurt Gramlich, who is the German
coordinator for Skolelinux. We were looking for an all-in-one open
source community-supported distribution for schools, and Kurt
introduced us to Skolelinux for this purpose.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Quick installation,

works (almost) out of the box,

contains many useful software packages for teaching and learning,

is a purely community-based distro and not controlled by a
single company,

has a large number of supporters and teachers who share their
experience and problem solutions.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Skolelinux is - as we had to learn - not easily upgradable to
the next version. Opposed to its genuine Debian base, upgrading to
a new version means a full new installation from scratch to get it
working again reliably.

Skolelinux is based on Debian/stable, and therefore always a
little outdated in terms of program versions compared to Edubuntu or
similar educational Linux distros, which rather use Debian/testing
as their base.

Skolelinux has some very self-opinionated and stubborn default
configuration which in my opinion adds unnecessary complexity and is
not always suitable for a schools needs, the preset network
configuration is actually a core definition feature of Skolelinux
and not easy to change, so schools sometimes have to change their
network configuration to make it "Skolelinux-compatible".

Some proposed extensions, which were made available as
contribution, like secure examination mode and lecture material
distribution and collection, were not accepted into the mainline
Skolelinux development and are now not easy to maintain in the
future because of Skolelinux somewhat undeterministic update
schemes.

Skolelinux has only a very tiny number of base developers
compared to Debian.

For these reasons and experience from our project, I would now
rather consider using plain Debian for schools next time, until
Skolelinux is more closely integrated into Debian and becomes
upgradeable without reinstallation.

Which free software do you use daily?

GNU/Linux with LXDE desktop, bash for interactive dialog and
programming, texlive for documentation and correspondence,
occasionally LibreOffice for document format conversion. Various
programming languages for teaching.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Strong arguments are

Knowledge is free, and so should be methods and tools for
teaching and learning.

Students can learn with and use the same software at school, at
home, and at their working place without running into license or
conversion problems.

Closed source or proprietary software hides knowledge rather
than exposing it, and proprietary software vendors try to bind
customers to certain products. But teachers need to teach
science, not products.

If you have everything you for daily work as open source, what
would you need proprietary software for?

The Debian Edu and
Skolelinux distribution have users and contributors all around the
globe. And a while back, an enterprising young man showed up on
our IRC channel
#debian-edu and started asking questions about how Debian Edu
worked. We answered as good as we could, and even convinced him to
help us with translations. And today I managed to get an interview
with him, to learn more about him.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a 25 year old free software enthusiast, living in Romania,
which is also my country of origin. Back in 2009, at a New Year's Eve
party, I had a very nice beer discussion with a
friend, when we realized we have no organised Debian community in our
country. A few days later, we put together the infrastructure for such
community and even gathered a nice Debian-ish crowd. Since then, I
began my quest as a free software hacker and activist and I am
constantly trying to cover as much ground as possible on that
field.

A few years ago I founded a small web development company, which
provided me the flexible schedule I needed so much for my
activities. For the last 13 months, I have been the Technical Director
of Fundația Ceata, which is a free
software activist organisation endorsed by the FSF and the FSFE, and
the only one we have in our country.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

The idea of participating in the Debian Edu project was a surprise
even to me, since I never used it before I began getting involved in
it. This year I had a great opportunity to deliver a talk on
educational software, and I knew immediately where to look. It was a
love at first sight, since I was previously involved with some of the
technologies the project incorporates, and I rapidly found a lot of
ways to contribute.

My first contributions consisted in translating the installer and
configuration dialogs, then I found some bugs to squash (I still
haven't fixed them yet though), and I even got my eyes on some other
areas where I can prove myself helpful. Since the appetite for free
software in my country is pretty low, I'll be happy to be the first
one around here advocating for the project's adoption in educational
environments, and maybe even get my hands dirty in creating a flavour
for our own needs. I am not used to make very advanced plannings, so
from now on, time will tell what I'll be doing next, but I think I
have a pretty consistent starting point.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Not a long time ago, I was in the position of configuring and
maintaining a LDAP server on some Debian derivative, and I must say it
took me a while. A long time ago, I was maintaining a bigger
Samba-powered infrastructure, and I must say I spent quite a lot of
time on it. I have similar stories about many of the services included
with Skolelinux, and the main advantage I see about it is the
out-of-the box availability of them, making it quite competitive when
it comes to managing a school's network, for example.

Of course, there is more to say about Skolelinux than the
availability of the software included, its flexibility in various
scenarios is something I can't wait to experiment "into the wild" (I
only played with virtual machines so far). And I am sure there is a
lot more I haven't discovered yet about it, being so new within the
project.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

As usual, when it comes to Debian Blends, I see as the biggest
disadvantage the lack of a numerous team dedicated to the
project. Every day I see the same names in the changelogs, and I have
a constantly fear of the bus factor in this story. I'd like to see
Debian Edu advertised more as an entry point into the Debian
ecosystem, especially amongst newcomers and students. IMHO there are a
lot low-hanging fruits in terms of bug squashing, and enough
opportunities to get the feeling of the Debian Project's dynamics. Not
to mention it's a very fun blend to work on!

Derived from the previous statement, is the delay in catching up
with the main Debian release and documentation. This is common though
to all blends and derivatives, but it's an issue we can all work
on.

Which free software do you use daily?

I can hardly imagine myself spending a day without Vim, since my
daily routine covers writing code and hacking configuration files. I
am a fan of the Awesome window manager (but I also like the
Enlightenment project a lot!),
Claws Mail due to its ease of
use and very configurable behaviour. Recently I fell in love with
Redshift, which helps me
get through the night without headaches. Of course, there is much more
stuff in this bag, but I'll need a blog on my own for doing this!

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Well, on this field, I cannot do much more than experiment right
now. So, being far from having a recipe for success, I can only assume
that:

schools would like to get rid of proprietary software

students will love the openness of the system, and will want to
experiment with it - maybe we need to harvest the native curiosity
of teenagers more?

there is no "right one" when it comes to strategies, but it would
be useful to have some success stories published somewhere, so
other can get some inspiration from them (I know I'd promote
them!)

more active promotion - talks, conferences, even small school
lectures can do magical things if they encounter at least one
person interested. Who knows who that person might be? ;-)

I also see some problems in getting Skolelinux into schools; for
example, in our country we have a great deal of corruption issues, so
it might be hard(er) to fight against proprietary solutions. Also,
people who relied on commercial software for all their lives, would be
very hard to convert against their will.

There is a certain cross-over between the
Debian Edu / Skolelinux
project and the Edubuntu
project, and for example the LTSP packages in Debian are a joint
effort between the projects. One person with a foot in both camps is
Jonathan Carter, which I am now happy to present to you.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a South-African free software geek who lives in Cape Town. My
days vary quite a bit since I'm involved in too many things. As I'm
getting older I'm learning how to focus a bit more :)

I'm also an Edubuntu contributor and I love when there are
opportunities for the Edubuntu and Debian Edu projects to benefit from
each other.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I've been somewhat familiar with the project before, but I think my
first direct exposure to the project was when I met Petter
[Reinholdtsen] and Knut [Yrvin] at the Edubuntu summit in 2005 in
London. They provided great feedback that helped the bootstrapping of
Edubuntu. Back then Edubuntu (and even Ubuntu) was still very new and
it was great getting input from people who have been around longer. I
was also still very excitable and said yes to everything and to this
day I have a big todo list backlog that I'm catching up with. I think
over the years the relationship between Edubuntu and Debian-Edu has
been gradually improving, although I think there's a lot that we could
still improve on in terms of working together on packages. I'm sure
we'll get there one day.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Debian itself already has so many advantages. I could go on about
it for pages, but in essence I love that it's a very honest project
that puts its users first with no hidden agendas and also produces
very high quality work.

I think the advantage of Debian Edu is that it makes many common
set-up tasks simpler so that administrators can get up and running
with a lot less effort and frustration. At the same time I think it
helps to standardise installations in schools so that it's easier for
community members and commercial suppliers to support.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I had to re-type this one a few times because I'm trying to
separate "disadvantages" from "areas that need improvement" (which is
what I originally rambled on about)

The biggest disadvantage I can think of is lack of manpower. The
project could do so much more if there were more good contributors. I
think some of the problems are external too. Free software and free
content in education is a no-brainer but it takes some time to catch
on. When you've been working with the same proprietary eco-system for
years and have gotten used to it, it can be hard to adjust to some
concepts in the free software world. It would be nice if there were
more Debian Edu consultants across the world. I'd love to be one
myself but I'm already so over-committed that it's just not possible
currently.

I think the best short-term solution to that large-scale problem is
for schools to be pro-active and share their experiences and grow
their skills in-house. I'm often saddened to see how much money
educational institutions spend on 3rd party solutions that they don't
have access to after the service has ended and they could've gotten so
much more value otherwise by being more self-sustainable and
autonomous.

Which free software do you use daily?

My main laptop dual-boots between Debian and Windows 7. I was
Windows free for years but started dual-booting again last year for
some games which help me focus and relax (Starcraft II in
particular). Gaming support on Linux is improving in leaps and bounds
so I suppose I'll soon be able to regain that disk space :)

Besides that I rely on Icedove, Chromium, Terminator, Byobu, irssi,
git, Tomboy, KVM, VLC and LibreOffice. Recently I've been torn on
which desktop environment I like and I'm taking some refuge in Xfce
while I figure that out. I like tools that keep things simple. I enjoy
Python and shell scripting. I went to an Arduino workshop recently and
it was awesome seeing how easy and simple the IDE software was to get
up and running in Debian compared to the users running Windows and OS
X.

I also use mc which some people frown upon slightly. I got used to
using Norton Commander in the early 90's and it stuck (I think the
people who sneer at it is just jealous that they don't know how to use
it :p)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I think trying to force it is unproductive. I also think that in
many cases it's appropriate for schools to use non-free systems and I
don't think that there's any particular moral or ethical problem with
that.

I do think though that free software can already solve so so many
problems in educational institutions and it's just a shame not taking
advantage of that.

I also think that some curricula need serious review. For example,
some areas of the world rely heavily on very specific versions of MS
Office, teaching students to parrot menu items instead of learning the
general concepts. I think that's very unproductive because firstly, MS
Office's interface changes drastically every few years and on top of
that it also locks in a generation to a product that might not be the
best solution for them.

To answer your question, I believe that the right strategy is to
educate and inform, giving someone the information they require to
make a decision that would work for them.

It has been a while since my last English
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
interview last November. But the developers and translators are still
pulling along to get the Wheezy based release out the door, and this
time I managed to get an interview from one of the French translators
in the project, Cédric Boutillier.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am 34 year old. I live near Paris, France. I am an assistant
professor in probability theory. I spend my daytime teaching
mathematics at the university and doing fundamental research in
probability in connexion with combinatorics and statistical physics.

I have been involved in the Debian project for a couple of years
and became Debian Developer a few months ago. I am working on Ruby
packaging, publicity and translation.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I came to the Debian Edu project after a call for translation of
the
Debian Edu manual for the release of Debian Edu Squeeze. Since
then, I have been working on updating the French translation of the
manual.

I had the opportunity to make an installation of Debian Edu in a
virtual machine when I was preparing localised version of some screen
shots for the manual. I was amazed to see it worked out of the box and
how comprehensive the list of software installed by default was.

What amazed me was the complete network infrastructure directly
ready to use, which can and the nice administration interface provided
by GOsa². What pleased
me also was the fact that among the software installed by default,
there were many "traditional" educative software to learn languages,
to count, to program... but also software to develop creativity and
artistic skills with music (Ardour,
Audacity) and
movies/animation (I was especially thinking of
Stopmotion).

I am following the development of Debian Edu and am hanging out on
#debian-edu.
Unfortunately, I don't much time to get more involved in this
beautiful project.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

For me, the main advantages of Skolelinux/Debian Edu are its
community of experts and its precise documentation, as well as the
fact that it provides a solution ready to use.

I would add also the fact that it is based on the rock solid Debian
distribution, which ensures stability and provides a huge collection
of educational free software.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

Maybe the lack of manpower to do lobbying on the
project. Sometimes, people who need to take decisions concerning IT do
not have all the elements to evaluate properly free software
solutions. The fact that support by a company may be difficult to find
is probably a problem if the school does not have IT personnel.

One can find support from a company by looking at
the
wiki dokumentation, where some countries already have a number of
companies providing support for Debian Edu, like Germany or
Norway. This list is easy to find readily from the manual. However,
for other countries, like France, the list is empty. I guess that
consultants proposing support for Debian would be able to provide some
support for Debian Edu as well.

Which free software do you use daily?

I am using the KDE Plasma Desktop. But the pieces of software I use
most runs in a terminal: Mutt and OfflineIMAP for emails, latex for
scientific documents, mpd for music. VIM is my editor of choice. I am
also using the mathematical software
Scilab and
Sage (built from
source as not completely packaged for Debian, yet).

Do you have any suggestions for teachers interested in
using the free software in Debian to teach mathematics and
statistics?

I do not have any "nice" recommendations for statistics. At our
university, we use both R and
Scilab to teach statistics and probabilistic simulations. For
geometry, there are nice programs:

Here is another interview with one of the people in the Debian Edu and Skolelinux
community. I am running short on people willing to be interviewed, so
if you know about someone I should interview, Please send me an email.
After asking for many months, I finally managed to lure another one of
the people behind the German
"IT-Zukunft Schule"
project out from maternity leave to conduct an interview. Give a warm
welcome to Angela Fuß. :)

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a 39-year-old woman living in the very north of Germany near
Denmark. I live in a patchwork family with "my man" Mike Gabriel, my
two daughters, Mikes daughter and Mikes and my rather newborn son.

At the moment - because of our little baby - I am spending most of
the day by being a caring and organising mom for all the kids.
Besides that I am really involved into and occupied with several inner
growth processes: New born souls always bring the whole familiar
system into movement and that needs time and focus ;-). We are also
in the middle of buying a house and moving to it.

In 2013 I will work again in my job in a German foundation for
nature conservation. I am doing public relation work there. Besides
that - and that is the connection to Skolelinux / Debian Edu - I am
working in our own school project "IT-Zukunft Schule" in North
Germany. I am responsible for the quality assurance, the customer
relationship management and the communication processes in the
project.

Since 2001 I constantly have been training myself in communication
and leadership. Besides that I am a forester, a landscaping gardener
and a yoga teacher.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu
project?

I fell in love with Mike ;-).

Very soon after getting to know him I was completely enrolled into
Free Software. At this time Mike did IT-services for one newly
founded school in Kiel. Other schools in Kiel needed concepts for
their IT environment. Often when Mike came home from working at the
newly founded school I found myself listening to his complaints about
several points where the communication with the schools head or the
teachers did not work. So we were clear that he would not work for
one more school if we did not set up a structure for communication
between him, the schools head, the teachers, the students and the
parents.

Together with our friend and hardware supplier Andreas Buchholz we
started to get an overview of free software solutions suitable for
schools. One day before Christmas 2010 Mike and I had a date with Kurt
Gramlich in Gütersloh. As Kurt and I are really interested in building
networks of people and in being in communication we dived into
Skolelinux and brought it to the first grammar schools in Northern
Germany.

First I have to say: I cannot answer this question technically. My
answer comes rather from a social point of view.

The biggest advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu I see is the large
and strong international community of Debian Developers in the
background which is very alive and connected over mailinglists, blogs
and meetings. My constant feeling for the Debian Community is: If
something does not work they will somehow fix it. All is well
;-). This is of course a user experience. What I also get as a big
advantage of Skolelinux / Debian Edu is that everybody who uses it and
works with it can also contribute to it - that includes students,
teachers, parents...

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux / Debian
Edu?

I will answer this question relating to the internal structure of
Skolelinux / Debian Edu.

What I see as a major disadvantage is that there is a gap between
the group of developers for Debian Edu and the people who make the
marketing, that means the people that bring Skolelinux to the
schools. There is a lack of communication between these two groups and
I think that does not really work for Skolelinux / Debian Edu.

Further I appreciate that Skolelinux / Debian Edu is known as a
do-ocracy. Nevertheless I keep asking myself if at some points a
democracy or some kind of hierarchical project structure would be good
and helpful. I am also missing some kind of contact between the
Skolelinux / Debian Edu communities in Europe or on an international
level. I think it would be good if there was more sharing between the
different countries using Skolelinux / Debian Edu.

Which free software do you use daily?

On my laptop I am still using an Ubuntu 10.04 with a Gnome Desktop
on. As applications I use Openoffice.org, Gedit, Firefox, Pidgin,
LaTeX and GnuCash. For mails I am using Horde. And I am really fond of
my N900 running with Maemo.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I am really convinced that in our school project "IT-Zukunft
Schule" we have developed (and keep developing) a great way to get
schools to use Free Software. We have written a detailed concept for
that so I cannot explain the whole thing here. But in a nutshell the
strategy has three crucial pillars:

We really take time to get what sort of stories, questions and
concerns the schools head and the teachers have about using different
kinds of IT and we take time to enrol them into Free Software.

Our solution for schools is never just technical. In the centre
are always the people who are going to use the software. From the very
beginning of the planning for a school, we tell the schools head that
they are paying us not only for a technical solution for their school,
they also pay us for leading all the communication processes
needed. If they do not want that, we are not working with them because
we cannot give a guarantee for the quality of our work then.

Another focus lies in the training of teachers and students in
co-administrating the IT-System at their school. They start getting in
contact with the Skolelinux / Debian Edu community and they get the
offer to become more and more independent from us.

After a long break in my row of interviews with people in the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
community, I finally found time to wrap up another. This time it is
Giorgio Pioda, which showed up on the mailing list at the start of
this year, asking questions and inspiring us to improve the first time
administrators experience with Skolelinux. :) The interview was
conduced in May, but I only found time to publish it now.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I have a PhD in chemistry but since several years I work as teacher
in secondary (15-18 year old students) and tertiary (a kind of "light"
university) schools. Five years ago I started to manage a Learning
Management Service server and slowly I got more and more involved with
IT. 3 years ago the graduating schools moved completely to Linux and I
got the head of the IT for this. The experience collected in chemistry
labs computers (for example NMR analysis of protein folding) and in
the IT-courses during university where sufficient to start. Self
training is anyway very important

I live in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, and the
SPSE school (secondary) is a very
special sport school for young people who try to became sport pro (for
all sports, we have dozens of disciplines represented) and we are
recognised by the Olympic Swiss Organisation.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Looking for Linux / Primary Domain Controller (PDC) I found it
already several years ago. But since the system was still not
Kerberized and since our schools relies strongly on laptops I didn't
use it. I plan to introduce it in the next future, probably for the
next school year, since the squeeze release solved this security
hole.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Many. First of all there is a strong and living community that is
very generous for help and hints. Chat help is crucial, together with
the mailing list. Second. With Skolelinux you get an already well
engineered platform and you don't have to start to build up your PDC
and your clients from GNU/scratch; I've already done this once and I
can tell it, it is hard. Third, since Skolelinux is a standard
platform, it is way easier to educate other IT people and even if the
head IT is sick another one could pick up the task without too much
hassle.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The only real problem I see is that it is a little too less
flexible at client level. Debian stable is rocky and desirable, but
there are many reasons that force for another choice. For example the
need of new drivers for new PC, or the need for a specific OS for some
devices that have specific software packages for another specific
distribution (I have such a case for whiteboards that have only
Ubuntu packages). Thus, I prepared compatibility packages educlient
and eduroaming, hoping not to use them ;-)

Which free software do you use daily?

I have a Debian Stable PDC at school (Kerberos, NIS, NFS) with
mixed Debian and Ubuntu clients. If you think that this triad
combination is exotic... well I discovered right yesterday that
Perceus
has the same...

For myself I run Debian wheezy/sid, but this combination is good
only I you have enough competence to fix stuff for yourself, if
something breaks. Daily I use texmacs, gnumeric, a little bit of R
statistics, kmplot, and less frequently OpenOffice.org.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I think that the only real argument that school managers "hear" is
cost reduction. They don't give too much weight on quality, stability,
just because they are normally not open to change.

Students adapts very quickly to GNU/Linux (and for them being able
to switch between different OS is a plus value); teachers and managers
don't.

We decided to move to Linux because students at our school have own
laptop and we have the responsibility to keep the laptop ready to use;
we were really unsatisfied with Microsoft since every Monday we had 20
machine to fix for viral infections... With Linux this has been
reduced to zero, since people installs almost only from official
repositories. I think that our special needs brought us to Linux.
Those who don't have such needs will hardly move to Linux.

The Debian Edu /
Skolelinux project have users all over the globe, but until
recently we have not known about any users in Norway's neighbour
country Sweden. This changed when George Bredberg showed up in March
this year on the mailing list, asking interesting questions about how
to adjust and scale the just released
Debian Edu
Wheezy setup to his liking. He granted me an interview, and I am
happy to share his answers with you here.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a 44 year old country guy that have been working 12 years at
the same school as 50% IT-manager and 50% Teacher. My educational
background is fil.kand in history and religious beliefs, an exam as a
"folkhighschool" teacher, that is, for teaching grownups. In
Norwegian I believe it's called "Vuxenupplaring". I also have a master
in "Technology and social change". So I'm not really a tech guy, I
just like to study how humans and technology interact and that is my
perspective when working with IT.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

I have followed the Skolelinux project for quite some time by
now. Earlier I tested out the K12-LTSP project, which we used for some
time, but I really like the idea of having a distribution aimed to be
a complete solution for schools with necessary tools integrated. When
K12-LTSP abandoned that idea some years ago, I started to look more
seriously into Skolelinux instead.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The big point of Skolelinux to me is that it is a complete
distribution, ready to install. It has LDAP-support, MS Windows
integration tools and so forth already configured, saving an
administrator a lot of time and headache. We were using another Linux
based thin-client system called Thinlinc, that has served us very
well. But that Skolelinux is based on VNC and LTSP, to me, is better
when it comes to the kind of multimedia used in schools. That is
showing videos from Youtube or educational TV. It is also easier to
mix thin clients with workstations, since the user settings will be the
same. In our VNC-based solution you had to "beat around the bush" by
setting up a second, hidden, home-directory for user settings for the
workstations, because they will be different from the ones used on the
thin clients. Skolelinux support for diskless workstations are very
convenient since a school today often need to use a class room
projector showing videos in full screen. That is easily done with a
small integrated media computer running as a diskless workstation. You
have only two installs to update and configure. One for the thin
clients and one for the workstations. Also saving a lot of time. Our
old system was also based on Redhat and CentOS. They are both very
nice distributions, but they are sometimes painfully slow when it
comes to updating multimedia support and multimedia programs (even
such as Gimp), leaving us with a bit "oldish" applications. Debian is
quicker to update.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Debian is a bit too quick when it comes to updating. As an example
we use old HP terminals as thinclients, and two times already this
year (2012) the updates you get from the repositories has stopped
sound from working with them. It's a kernel/ALSA issue. So you have
to be more careful properly testing the updates before you run them in
a production environment. This has never happened with CentOS.

I also would like to be able to set my own domain-settings at
install time. In Skolelinux they are kind of hard coded into the
distribution, when it comes to LDAP and at least samba integration.
That is more a cosmetic/translation issue, and not a real problem.
Running MS Windows applications within the Skolelinux environment needs
to be better supported. That is, running them seamlessly via RDP, and
support for single-sign on. That will make the transition to free
software easier, because you can keep the applications you really
need. No support will make it impossible if you work in a school where
some applications can't be open source. As for us we really need to
run Adobe InDesign in our journalist classes. We run a journalist
education, and is one of the very few non university ones that is ok:d
by Svenska journalistförbundet (Swedish journalist association). Our
education gives the pupils the right of membership there, once they
are done. This is important if you want to get a job.

Adobe InDesign is the program most commonly used in newspapers and
magazines. We used Quark Express before, but they seem to loose there
market to Adobe. The only "equivalent" to InDesign in the opensource
world is Scribus, and its not advanced enough. At least not according
to the teacher. I think it would be possible to use it, because they
are not supposed to learn a program, they are supposed to learn how to
edit and compile a newspaper. But politically at our school we are not
there yet. And Scribus lacks a lot of things you find i InDesign.

We used even a windows program for sound editing when it comes to
the radio-journalist part. The year to come we are going to try
Audacity. That software has the same kind of limitations compared to
Adobe Audition, but that teacher is a bit more open minded. We have
tried Ardour also, but that instead is more like a music studio
program, not intended for the kind of editing taking place in a radio
studio. Its way to complex and the GUI is to scattered when you only
want to cut, make pass-overs, add extra channels and normalise. Those
things you can do in Audacity, but its not as easy as in Audition. You
have to do more things manually with envelopes, and that is a bit old
fashion and timewasting. Its also harder to cut and move sound from
one channel to another, which is a thing that you do frequently
because you often find yourself needing to rearrange parts of the
sound file.

So, I am not sure we will succeed in replacing even Audition, but we
will try. The problem is the students have certain expectations when
they start an education towards a profession. So the programs has to
look and feel professional. Good thing with radio, there are many
programs out there, that radio studios use, so its not as standardised
as Newspaper editing. That means, it does not really matter what
program they learn, because once they start working they still have to
learn the program the studio uses, so instead focus has to be to learn
the editing part without to much focus on a specific software.

Which free software do you use daily?

Myself I'm running Linux Mint, or Ubuntu these days. I use almost
only open source software, and preferably Linux based. When it comes
to most used applications its OpenOffice, and Firefox (of course ;)
)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

To get schools to use free software there has to be good open
source software that are windows based, to ease the transition. But
it's also very important that the multimedia support is working
flawlessly. The problems with Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and whatever
will create problems when it comes to both teachers and
students. Economy are also important for schools, so using thin
clients, as long as they have good multimedia support, is a very good
idea. It's also important that the open source software works even for
the administration. It's hard to convince the teachers to stick with
open source, if the principal has to run Windows. It also creates a
problem if some classes has to use Windows for there tasks, since that
will create a difference in "status" between classes, so a good
support for running windows applications via the thin client (Linux)
desktop is essential. At least at our school, where we have mixed
level of educations, from high-school to journalist-school.

Update 2012-07-09 08:30: Paul Wise tipped me on IRC about three
useful sources related to Free Software for radio stations: the LWN
article Radio station
management with Airtime,
Airtime which
claim to be a Free open source radio automation software and
Rivendell which claim to
be complete radio broadcast automation solution. All of them seem
useful to the aspiring radio producer.

I've been too busy at home, but finally I found time to wrap up
another interview with the people behind
Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
This time we get to know José Luis Redrejo Rodríguez, one of our great
helpers from Spain. His effort was the reason we added support for
several desktop types (KDE, Gnome and most recently LXDE) in Debian
Edu, and have all of these available in the recently published
Debian Edu
Squeeze version.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I'm a father, teacher and engineer who is working for the Education
ministry of the Region of Extremadura (Spain) in the implementation of
ICT in schools

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

At 2006, I verified that both, we in Extremadura and Skolelinux
project, had been working in parallel for some years, doing very
similar things, using very similar tools and with similar targets, so
I decided it was time to join forces as much as possible.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

A community of highly skilled experts working together, with a
really open schema of collaboration and work. I really love the
concepts of Do-ocracy and Merit-ocracy and the way these concepts are
been used everyday inside Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Sometimes the differences in the implementations, laws or
economical and technical resources in the different countries don't
allow us to agree in the same solution for all of us, and several
approaches are needed, what is a waste of effort. Also, there is a
lack of more man power to be able to follow the fast evolution of the
technologies in school.

Which free software do you use daily?

Debian, of course, and due to my kind of job I am most of my time
between Iceweasel, Geany and
Terminator.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I think there is not a single strategy because there are very
different scenarios: schools with mixed proprietary and free
environments, schools using only workstations, other schools using
laptops, netbooks, tablets, interactive white-boards, etc.

Also the range of ages of the students is very broad and you can
not use the same solutions for primary schools and secondary or even
universities. So different strategies are needed.

But, looking at these differences, and looking back to the things
we've done and implemented, and the places were we have spent most of
our forces, I think we should focus as much as possible in free
multi-platform environments, using only standards tools, and moving
more and more to Internet or network solutions that could be deployed
using wireless. I think we'll see more and more personal devices in
the schools, devices the students and teachers will take home with
them, so the solutions must be able to be taken at home and continue
working there.

Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
Debian Edu
Squeeze version.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
(Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
by Angela).

During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
becoming an osteopath.

Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
"IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
skills with communication skills.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
"IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
distributions that target being used for school networks.

At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.

In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
protection experts, other IT professionals.

We came to two conclusions:

First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
point.

Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
tries to provide an approach for this.

Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
spare time.

We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
non-existent until 2010/2011.

Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
avoidance do exist.

We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
and probably a gain for all.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
project communication, honest communication within the group of
developers, etc.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Every coin has two sides:

Technically: BTS issue
#311188, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
contribute).

Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
there being rather disconnected from the development department of
Debian Edu / Skolelinux.

Which free software do you use daily?

For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.

For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.

I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.

For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
whiteboard.

My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

In 2003, a German teacher showed up on the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
mailing list with interesting problems and reports proving he setting
up Linux for a (for us at the time) lot of pupils. His name was Ralf
Gesellensetter, and he has been an important tester and contributor
since then, helping to make sure the
Debian Edu
Squeeze release became as good as it is..

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I am a teacher from Germany, and my subjects are Geography,
Mathematics, and Computer Science ("Informatik"). During the past 12
years (since 2000), I have been working for a comprehensive (and soon,
also inclusive) school leading to all kind of general levels, such as
O- or A-level ("Abitur"). For quite as long, I've been taking care of
our computer network.

Now, in my early 40s, I enjoy the privilege of spending a lot of my
spare time together with my wife, our son (3 years) and our daughter
(4 months).

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

We had tried different Linux based school servers, when members of
my local Linux User Group (LUG OWL) detected Skolelinux. I remember
very well, being part of a party celebrating the Linux New Media Award
("Best Newcomer Distribution", also nominated: Ubuntu) that was given
to Skolelinux at Linux World Exposition in Frankfurt, 2005 (IIRC). Few
months later, I had the chance to join a developer meeting in Ulsrud
(Oslo) and to hand out the award to Knut Yrvin and others. For more
than 7 years, Skolelinux is part of our schools infrastructure, namely
our main server (tjener), one LTSP (today without thin clients), and
approximately 50 work stations. Most of these have the option to boot a
locally installed Skolelinux image. As a consequence, I joined quite
a few events dealing with free software or Linux, and met many Debian
(Edu) developers. All of them seemed quite nice and competent to me,
one more reason to stick to Skolelinux.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

Debian driven, you are given all the advantages of a community
project including well maintained updates. Once, you are familiar with
the network layout, you can easily roll out an entire educational
computer infrastructure, from just one installation media. As only
free software (FOSS) is used, that supports even elderly hardware,
up-sizing your IT equipment is only limited by space (i.e. available
labs). Especially if you run a LTSP thin client server, your
administration costs tend towards zero.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

While Debian's stability has loads of advantages for servers, this
might be different in some cases for clients: Schools with unlimited
budget might buy new hardware with components that are not yet
supported by Debian stable, or wish to use more recent versions of
office packages or desktop environments. These schools have the
option to run Debian testing or other distributions - if they have the
capacity to do so. Another issue is that Debian release cycles
include a wide range of changes; therefor a high percentage of human
power seems to be absorbed by just keeping the features of Skolelinux
within the new setting of the version to come. During this process,
the cogs of Debian Edu are getting more and more professional,
i.e. harder to understand for novices.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Support computer science as regular subject in schools to make
people really "own" their hardware, to make them understand the
difference between proprietary software products, and free software
developing.

Make budget baskets corresponding: In Germany's public schools
there are more or less fixed budgets for IT equipment (including
licenses), so schools won't benefit from any savings here. This
privilege is left to private schools which have consequently a large
share among German Skolelinux schools.

Get free software in the seminars where would-be teachers are
trained. In many cases, teachers' software customs are respected by
decision makers rather than the expertise of any IT experts.

Don't limit ourself to free software run natively. Everybody uses
free software or free licenses (for instance Wikipedia), and this
general concept should get expanded to free educational content to be
shared world wide (school books e.g.).

Make clear where ever you can that the market share of free (libre)
office suites is much above 20 p.c. today, and that you pupils don't
need to know the "ribbon menu" in order to get employed.

Talk about the difference between freeware and free software.

Spread free software, or even collections of portable free apps
for USB pen drives. Endorse students to get a legal copy of
Libreoffice rather than accepting them to use illegal serials. And
keep sending documents in ODF formats.

It has been a few busy weeks for me, but I am finally back to
publish another interview with the people behind
Debian Edu and Skolelinux.
This time it is one of our German developers, who have helped out over the
years to make sure both a lot of major but also a lot of the minor
details get right before release.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Jürgen Leibner, I'm 49 years old and living in
Bielefeld, a town in northern Germany. I worked nearly 20 years as
certified engineer in the department for plant design and layout of an
international company for machinery and equipment. Since 2011 I'm a
certified technical writer (tekom e.V.) and doing technical
documentations for a steam turbine manufacturer. From April this year
I will manage the department of technical documentation at a
manufacturer of automation and assembly line engineering.

My first contact with linux was around 1993. Since that time I used
it at work and at home repeatedly but not exclusively as I do now at
home since 2006.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Once a day in the early year of 2001 when I wanted to fetch my
daughter from primary school, there was a teacher sitting in the
middle of 20 old computers trying to boot them and he failed. I helped
him to get them booting. That was seen by the school director and she
asked me if I would like to manage that the school gets all that old
computers in use. I answered: "Yes".

Some weeks later every of the 10 classrooms had one computer
running Windows98. I began to collect old computers and equipment as
gifts and installed the first computer room with a peer-to-peer
network. I did my work at school without being payed in my spare time
and with a lot of fun. About one year later the school was connected
to Internet and a local area network was installed in the school
building. That was the time to have a server and I knew it must be a
Linux server to be able to fulfil all the wishes of the teachers and
being able to do this in a transparent and economic way, without extra
costs for things like licence and software. So I searched for a
school server system running under Linux and I found a couple of
people nearby who founded 'skolelinux.de'. It was the Skolelinux
prerelease 32 I first tried out for being used at the school. I
managed the IT of that school until the municipal authority took over
the IT management and centralised the services for all schools in
Bielefeld in December of 2006.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

When I'm looking back to the beginning, there were other advantages
for me as today.

In the past there were advantages like:

I don't need to buy it so it generates no costs to the school as
they had little money to spent for computers and software.

It has a licence which grands all rights to use it without
cost.

It was more able to fit all requirements of a server system for
schools than a Microsoft server system, even if there are only Windows
clients because of it's preconfigured overall concept of being a
infrastructure solution and community for schools, not only a
server

I was able to configure the server to the needs of the
school.

Today some of the advantages has been lost, changed or new ones
came up in this way:

Most schools here do have money to buy hardware and software
now.

They are today mostly managed from central IT departments which
have own concepts which often do not fit to Debian Edu concepts
because they are to close to Microsoft ideology.

With the Squeeze version of Debian Edu which now uses GOsa² for
management I feel more able to manage the daily tasks than with the
interfaces used in the past.

It is more modular than in the past and fits even better to the
different needs.

The documentation is usable and gets better every day.

More people than ever before are using Debian Edu all over the
world and so the community, which is an very important part I think,
is sharing knowledge and minds.

Most, maybe all, of the technical requirements for schools are
solved today by Debian Edu.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

There are too few IT companies able to integrate Debian Edu into
their product portfolio for serving schools with concepts or even
whole municipality areas.

Debian Edu has beside other free and open software projects not
enough lobbyists which promote free and open software to
politicians.

Technically there are no disadvantages I'm aware of.

Which free software do you use daily?

I use Debian stable on my home server and on my little desktop
computer. On my laptop I use Debian testing/sid. The applications I
use on my laptop and my desktop are Open/Libre-office, Iceweasel,
KMail, DigiKam, Amarok, Dolphin, okular and all the other programs I
need from the KDE environment. On console I use newsbeuter, mutt,
screen, irssi and all the other famous and useful tools.

My home server provides mail services with exim, dovecot, roundcube
and mutt over ssh on the console, file services with samba, NFS,
rsync, web services with apache, moinmoin-wiki, multimedia services
with gallery2 and mediatomb and database services with MySQL for me
and the whole family. I probably forgot something.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

I believe, we should provide concepts for IT companies to integrate
Debian Edu into their product portfolio with use cases for different
countries and areas all over the world.

Behind Debian Edu and
Skolelinux there are a lot of people doing the hard work of
setting together all the pieces. This time I present to you Andreas
Mundt, who have been part of the technical development team several
years. He was also a key contributor in getting GOsa and Kerberos set
up in the recently released
Debian
Edu Squeeze version.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Andreas Mundt, I grew up in south Germany. After
studying Physics I spent several years at university doing research in
Quantum Optics. After that I worked some years in an optics company.
Finally I decided to turn over a new leaf in my life and started
teaching 10 to 19 years old kids at school. I teach math, physics,
information technology and science/technology.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Already before I switched to teaching, I followed the Debian Edu
project because of my interest in education and Debian. Within the
qualification/training period for the teaching, I started
contributing.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The advantages of Debian Edu are the well known name, the
out-of-the-box philosophy and of course the great free software of the
Debian Project!

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

As every coin has two sides, the out-of-the-box philosophy has its
downside, too. In my opinion, it is hard to modify and tweak the
setup, if you need or want that. Further more, it is not easily
possible to upgrade the system to a new release. It takes much too
long after a Debian release to prepare the -Edu release, perhaps
because the number of developers working on the core of the code is
rather small and often busy elsewhere.

The Debian LAN
project might fill the use case of a more flexible system.

Which free software do you use daily?

I am only using non-free software if I am forced to and run Debian
on all my machines. For documents I prefer LaTeX and PGF/TikZ, then
mutt and iceweasel for email respectively web browsing. At school I
have Arduino and Fritzing in use for a micro controller project.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

One of the major problems is the vendor lock-in from top to bottom:
Especially in combination with ignorant government employees and
politicians, this works out great for the "market-leader". The school
administration here in Baden-Wuerttemberg is occupied by that vendor.
Documents have to be prepared in non-free, proprietary formats. Even
free browsers do not work for the school administration. Publishers
of school books provide software only for proprietary platforms.

To change this, political work is very important. Parts of the
political spectrum have become aware of the problem in the last years.
However it takes quite some time and courageous politicians to 'free'
the system. There is currently some discussion about "Open Data" and
"Free/Open Standards". I am not sure if all the involved parties have
a clue about the potential of these ideas, and probably only a
fraction takes them seriously. However it might slowly make free
software and the philosophy behind it more known and popular.

I'm a 44-year-old linguistics graduate living in Edinburgh who has
occasionally been employed as a sysadmin.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

I'm neither a developer nor a Skolelinux/Debian Edu user! The only
reason my name's in the credits for the documentation is that I hang
around on debian-l10n-english waiting for people to mention things
they'd like a native English speaker to proofread... So I did a sweep
through the wiki for typos and Norglish and inconsistent spellings of
"localisation".

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

These questions are too hard for me - I don't use it! In fact I
had hardly any contact with I.T. until long after I'd got out of the
education system.

I can tell you the advantages of Debian for me though: it soaks up
as much of my free time as I want and no more, and lets me do
everything I want a computer for without ever forcing me to spend
money on the latest hardware.

Which free software do you use daily?

I've been using Debian since Rex; popularity-contest says the
software that I use most is xinit, xterm, and xulrunner (in other
words, I use a distinctly retro sort of desktop).

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Well, I don't know. I suppose I'd be inclined to try reasoning
with the people who make the decisions, but obviously if that worked
you would hardly need a strategy.

Germany is a core area for the
Debian Edu and Skolelinux
user community, and this time I managed to get hold of Wolfgang
Schweer, a valuable contributor to the project from Germany.

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

I've studied Mathematics at the university 'Ruhr-Universität' in
Bochum, Germany. Since 1981 I'm working as a teacher at the school
"Westfalen-Kolleg
Dortmund", a second chance school. Here, young adults is given
the opportunity to get further education in order to do the school
examination 'Abitur', which will allow to study at a university. This
second chance is of value for those who want a better job perspective
or failed to get a higher school examination being teens.

Besides teaching I was involved in developing online courses for a
blended learning project called 'abitur-online.nrw' and in some other
information technology related projects. For about ten years I've been
teacher and coordinator for the 'abitur-online' project at my
school. Being now in my early sixties, I've decided to leave school at
the end of April this year.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

The first information about Skolelinux must have come to my
attention years ago and somehow related to LTSP (Linux Terminal Server
Project). At school, we had set up a network at the beginning of 1997
using Suse Linux on the desktop, replacing a Novell network. Since
2002, we used old machines from the city council of Dortmund as thin
clients (LTSP, later Ubuntu/Lessdisks) cause new hardware was out of
reach. At home I'm using Debian since years and - subscribed to the
Debian news letter - heard from time to time about Skolelinux. About
two years ago I proposed to replace the (somehow undocumented and only
known to me) system at school by a well known Debian based system:
Skolelinux.

Students and teachers appreciated the new system because of a
better look and feel and an enhanced access to local media on thin
clients. The possibility to alter and/or reset passwords using a GUI
was welcomed, too. Being able to do administrative tasks using a GUI
and to easily set up workstations using PXE was of very high value for
the admin teachers.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

It's open source, easy to set up, stable and flexible due to it's
Debian base. It integrates LTSP out-of-the-box. And it is documented!
So it was a perfect choice.

Being open source, there are no license problems and so it's
possible to point teachers and students to programs like
OpenOffice.org, ViewYourMind (mind mapping) and The Gimp. It's of
high value to be able to adapt parts of the system to special needs of
a school and to choose where to get support for this.

I teach ICT part time at the Rudolf Steiner School in Kings
Langley, near London, UK. Previously I worked as a technical
author/trainer while my children attended the school, and I also
contributed to the Schoolforge UK community with the aim of
encouraging UK schools to adopt free/open source software. Five or six
years ago we had about 50 schools interested in some way, but we
weren't able to convert many of them into sustainable
installations.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

Skolelinux had two representatives at an early Edubuntu meeting in
London which I attended. However at that time our school network had
just been installed using CentOS, LTSP 4 and GNOME. When LTSP 5 came
along we switched to Edubuntu thin client servers so now we have a
mixed environment which includes Windows PCs and student laptops, as
well as their MacBooks and iPads. However, the proprietary systems
have always been rather problematic, and we never built a GUI for the
LDAP server, so when I discovered Skolelinux is configured for all
these things we decided to try it.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

By far the biggest advantage is the Debian Edu community. Apart
from that I have always believed in the same "sustainable computing"
goals that Skolelinux is built on: installing Linux on computers which
would otherwise be thrown away, to provide a reliable, secure and
low-cost IT environment for schools. From my own experience I know
that a part-time person can teach and manage a network of about 25
Linux computers, but it would take much more of my time if we had
proprietary software everywhere.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

As a newcomer I'm just finding out who's who in the community and
how you're organised, and what your procedures are for dealing with
various things such as editing manual pages and so-on. The only
English language mailing list seems to be for developers as well as
users, so my inbox needs heavy pruning each day!

Which free software do you use daily?

Besides the software already mentioned at school we use Samba,
OpenLDAP, CUPS, Nagios and Dansguardian for the network, and on the
desktops we have LibreOffice, Firefox, GIMP and Inkscape. At home I
use Ubuntu and an Android 4 eePad Transformer (but I'm not sure if
that counts...)

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

That's a tough question! For very many years UK schools installed
and taught only proprietary software, so that at the highest levels
the notion of "computer" means simply "proprietary office
applications". However, schools today are experiencing budget
constraints, and many are having to think hard about upgrading Windows
XP. At the same time, we have students showing teachers how to use
iPads, MacBooks and Android, so the choice of operating system is no
longer quite so automatic. What is more, our government at last
realised that we need people with programming skills, so they're
putting coding back in the curriculum! And it's encouraging that the
first 10,000 Raspberry Pi units sold out in 2 hours.

I don't really know what strategy is going to get UK schools to use
free software, but building an active community of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu users in this country has to be part of it.

Inspired by the
interview series conducted by Raphael, I started a Norwegian
interview series with people involved in the Debian Edu / Skolelinux
community. This was so popular that I believe it is time to move to a
more international audience.

While Debian Edu and
Skolelinux originated in France and Norway, and have most users in
Europe, there are users all around the globe. One of those far away
from me is Nigel Barker, a long time Debian Edu system administrator
and contributor. It is thanks to him that Debian Edu is adjusted to
work out of the box in Japan. I got him to answer a few questions,
and am happy to share the response with you. :)

Who are you, and how do you spend your days?

My name is Nigel Barker, and I am British. I am married to Yumiko,
and we have three lovely children, aged 15, 14 and 4(!) I am the IT
Coordinator at Hiroshima International School, Japan. I am also a
teacher, and in fact I spend most of my day teaching Mathematics,
Science, IT, and Chemistry. I was originally a Chemistry teacher, but
I have always had an interest in computers. Another teacher teaches
primary school IT, but apart from that I am the only computer person,
so that means I am the network manager, technician and webmaster,
also, and I help people with their computer problems. I teach python
to beginners in an after-school club. I am way too busy, so I really
appreciate the simplicity of Skolelinux.

How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
project?

In around 2004 or 5 I discovered the ltsp project, and set up a
server in the IT lab. I wanted some way to connect it to our central
samba server, which I was also quite poor at configuring. I discovered
Edubuntu when it came out, but it didn't really improve my setup. I
did various desperate searches for things like "school Linux server"
and ended up in a document called "Drift" something or other. Reading
there it became clear that Skolelinux was going to solve all my
problems in one go. I was very excited, but apprehensive, because my
previous attempts to install Debian had ended in failure (I used
Mandrake for everything - ltsp, samba, apache, mail, ns...). I
downloaded a beta version, had some problems, so subscribed to the
Debian Edu list for help. I have remained subscribed ever since, and
my school has run a Skolelinux network since Sarge.

What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

For me the integrated setup. This is not just the server, or the
workstation, or the ltsp. Its all of them, and its all configured
ready to go. I read somewhere in the early documentation that it is
designed to be setup and managed by the Maths or Science teacher, who
doesn't necessarily know much about computers, in a small Norwegian
school. That describes me perfectly if you replace Norway with
Japan.

What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
Edu?

The desktop is fairly plain. If you compare it with Edubuntu, who
have fun themes for children, or with distributions such as Mint, who
make the desktop beautiful. They create a good impression on people
who don't need to understand how to use any of it, but who might be
important to the school. School administrators or directors, for
instance, or parents. Even kids. Debian itself usually has ugly
default theme settings. It was my dream a few years back that some
kind of integration would allow Edubuntu to do the desktop stuff and
Debian Edu the servers, but now I realise how impossible that is. A
second disadvantage is that if something goes wrong, or you need to
customise something, then suddenly the level of expertise required
multiplies. For example, backup wasn't working properly in Lenny. It
took me ages to learn how to set up my own server to do rsync backups.
I am afraid of anything to do with ldap, but perhaps Gosa will
help.

Which free software do you use daily?

Nowadays I only use Debian on my personal computers. I have one for
studio work (I play guitar and write songs), running AV Linux
(customised Debian) a netbook running Squeeze, and a bigger laptop
still running Skolelinux Lenny workstation. I have a Tjener in my
house, that's very useful for the family photos and music. At school
the students only use Skolelinux. (Some teachers and the office still
have windows). So that means we only use free software all day every
day. Open office, The GIMP, Firefox/Iceweasel, VLC and Audacity are
installed on every computer in school, irrespective of OS. We also
have Koha on Debian for the library, and Apache, Moodle, b2evolution
and Etomite on Debian for the www. The firewall is Untangle.

Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
get schools to use free software?

Current trends are in our favour. Open source is big in industry,
and ordinary people have heard of it. The spread of Android and the
popularity of Apple have helped to weaken the impression that you have
to have Microsoft on everything. People complain to me much less about
file formats and Word than they did 5 years ago. The Edu aspect is
also a selling point. This is all customised for schools. Where is the
Windows-edu, or the Mac-edu? But of course the main attraction is
budget.The trick is to convince people that the quality is not
compromised when you stop paying and use free software instead. That
is one reason why I say the desktop experience is a weakness. People
are not impressed when their USB drive doesn't work, or their browser
doesn't play flash, for example.